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It should not have come as a surprise that Craig Davidson made the Giller long list of 13 fiction writers, recently announced. After all, his debut collection of stories, Rust and Bone, earned a lot of favourable attention in 2005. Then his profile spiked in 2012 when French film director Jacques Audiard turned two of those stories into a highly prestigious movie that caused a stir at Cannes and earned a Golden Globe nomination for Marion Cotillard (playing a whale trainer who loses her legs). And Davidson’s gritty new novel, Cataract City, published this month by Doubleday, has the feel of a breakout major work.

But making that long list came as a big surprise to the self-effacing author, who at the age of 38 has learned to avoid great expectations, and seems to be constantly drawn, in both fiction and reality, to the dark side of life.

“Finding myself on the long list was one of the biggest shocks of my career,” Davidson confessed the other day, speaking from Birmingham, England, where he has enrolled in a PhD program in creative writing. “I guess I really wonder if the kind of stuff I write would appeal to a Giller jury. But I decided I should just bask in the pleasure of it.”

Basking in pleasure is not something that Davidson or the characters he creates are known for. Though his own upbringing was fairly standard middle-class, the world he depicts suggests a contemporary Ontario version of 19th century lower depths of Victorian London exposed by Dickens.

Davidson’s fiction focuses on tormented working-class characters, including hustlers and con artists struggling against the odds to avoid the destiny of being losers in a lively but tacky environment where dog-racing, bare-knuckle fighting and late-night smuggling are among the activities through which desperate people try to survive.

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Cataract City, the title of his current book, is an unflattering reference to Niagara Falls. Davidson, who spent his teenage years in nearby St. Catharines, worked summers at Marineland, and knows in his bones that the romantic image of the falls with its natural beauty is undercut by the sleazy carnival atmosphere of the casinos, wax museums, motels, vendors and bars of the gaudy strip so close to the falls.

Indeed, Cataract City traps and crushes those who live there. Owen Stuckey and Duncan Diggs are two dreamers who are bonded for life through surviving a harrowing boyhood experience when lost in the woods. They both have glimpses of glory but their friendship is damaged as young adults.

Owen, an aspiring athlete who becomes a cop, is the one on the right side of the law, but the more memorable character is Duncan, who makes bad choices, slips into the underworld and pays a terrible price, but still has dreams when he returns after eight years in jail.

Davidson knows that Duncan is the beating heart of his story but sees himself as more of an Owen — which is a bit like being cast as Nick, the observer, while someone else gets to play the title role in The Great Gatsby.

But Davidson has been known to take crazy, Duncan-like risks. For the sake of experiencing the life of the characters in The Fighter, his first novel, he turned himself into a hulk by injecting steroids — which caused alarming side effects, including insomnia and shrunken testicles. And in a misguided attempt to promote the book, he stepped into a boxing ring, where he was savagely beaten. (The stunt failed to pay off; the book’s sales were dismal.)

Even when he doesn’t go to such extremes, Davidson is a bit of a wanderer on an endless quest to discover where he belongs. Born in Toronto, he spent a chunk of his formative years in Ottawa and Calgary before his family moved to St. Catharines. He currently lives in the Humber Valley area of Toronto with his wife and their toddler, Nicholas. But in the course of trying to make a living while launching his literary career alive, Davidson has held many odd jobs, including teaching English in Japan, driving a bus for special needs passengers, planting trees, editing Muscle Mag and Maximum Fitness, and doing a stint as deputy editor of an alternative weekly in Fredericton.

Davidson has also sampled the groves of academe, first at the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop and currently in Birmingham, where the biggest part of his workload will be to write another novel. Once he gets his PhD in creative writing, he’ll have a secure future in the world of higher education so he won’t have to rely totally on the commercial returns from writing fiction.

At the moment, he could be at a turning point. The Giller short list of five will be announced on Oct. 8. If he’s on it, chances are Cataract City will be a bestseller. In which case, he may not need that PhD from Birmingham.

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